http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION, which has long favored dispensing jobs, college
admissions and government contracts on the basis of race, has now decided
that voting can be restricted by race as well.

Last week, the Clinton
Justice Department filed an amicus brief arguing that the state of Hawaii
has the right to prohibit whites, blacks, Asians and others from voting in
certain state elections. At issue is a 20-year-old state law that governs
elections for the Office of Hawaiian Affairs (OHA), a state board that
dispenses millions of dollars of public funds.

In 1996, Harold Rice tried to vote in a state election to choose trustees
to the OHA, but was turned away at the polls. Why? Because although he is a
state resident and a native of Hawaii whose lineage in the state goes back
several generations, Rice fails to meet the state's definition of "native
Hawaiian." And only Hawaiian natives can vote in the election of state
trustees for the OHA. Hawaii counts as "natives" only those persons who are
"descendants of the aboriginal people inhabiting the Hawaiian Islands ... in
1778, ..." or "any descendant of not less than one-half part of the races
inhabiting the Hawaiian Islands previous to 1778." Since Rice is white, he
can't vote -- nor can any black, Asian, American Indian or Hispanic living
in Hawaii for that matter.

This kind of voting restriction was supposed to have been outlawed by the
15th Amendment to the Constitution, which says that "the right of citizens
of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United
States or by any State on account of race, color or previous condition of
servitude." Of course, the 15th Amendment wasn't fully obeyed by Southern
states for almost 100 years after it was adopted, so Congress passed the
Voting Rights Act of 1965, giving the U.S. Justice Department the power to
monitor and intervene when any state interfered with the right of citizens
to vote because of race or color.

Now, Clinton Justice Department lawyers have turned their duty to uphold
the Constitution and faithfully execute the laws on its head. Instead of
defending the right of Harold Rice to vote in a state election regardless of
his skin color, the Justice Department is defending Hawaii's right to make
race a bona fide voting qualification.

The Justice Department claims that Hawaii isn't discriminating against
anyone but merely enacting legislation "on behalf of indigenous people with
whom it has established a trust responsibility." But the facts suggest
otherwise.

The first-known contact between the Polynesian people of Hawaii and
Europeans came in 1778, when Capt. James Cook first landed on the islands.
Hawaii became a U.S. possession in 1898, following the overthrow of the
hereditary monarchy that ruled the islands. The 1.8 million acres of land
previously owned by the crown were ceded to the U.S. government at that
time, and set aside in trust to "be used solely for the benefit of the
inhabitants of the Hawaiian Islands for educational and other purposes."

When Hawaii became a state in 1959, the U.S. ceded back the lands to the
new state to be used for any of five general purposes, including the
betterment of the conditions of indigenous Hawaiians. For almost 20 years,
the funds generated by the public land trust were administered to benefit
all Hawaiians, regardless of race, with most money used to support public
education.

But in 1978, the Hawaii state constitution was amended to provide
assistance from these funds to only two groups of people defined solely by
their racial ancestry. The Justice Department rationalizes that since only
certain Hawaiians can benefit from these funds, those same people should be
the only ones to choose trustees to administer the funds.

Imagine if this rationale were applied to other election contexts. Should
voting in school-board elections be restricted to persons with children
enrolled in public schools? Should renters be prohibited from voting to
decide property-tax issues, or English speakers denied a say on bilingual
education policy?

It's time the Clinton administration stopped trying to divide people by
race. Let's hope that's the message the Supreme Court will deliver when it
takes up this case this
fall.